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Comment by nostrademons | Hacker News Reader

This works until it doesn't. A classic example of someone that would want this 99.99% of the time but find the remaining 0.01% a showstopper might be a new parent. Blocking all the solicitors, scams, strangers, salespeople et al sounds great - until your kid is lost, finds a friendly adult with a cell phone, tries to call you, and can't get through because nobody that isn't on the whitelist can reach you. (Yes, we still have our kids memorize our phone numbers, or write them on labels with the kid.). It also doesn't really get better as you get older - if you're 70 years old and your 40-year-old kid is in a car accident and the doctor's trying to reach you, you would probably want to know.

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The issue is identity not phone numbers.

Most (all?) protocols conflate the two. But the real world doesn’t speak in phone numbers, ip addresses, and private keys.

This is immaterial here. If your loved one is in a hospital unconscious, it's a random doctor or a police officer who is going to contact you.

Group identities could help though. Let through emails and calls that are signed by a "official medical use" key, or "official federal police use" key. The public keys for those should be publicly available and easily verifiable.

User-level PKI is hard, and trust is shaky. Few well-known signature keys should be much easier. The infrastructure could, of course, be used for whatever other keys you choose to track and trust, e.g. your employer's org, your kid's school, etc. The problem of responsible stewardship remains, but is likely solvable in serious organizations with a dedicated IT department, like a hospital, or a police force.

Humans currently speak a different language than our technology.

You're moving closer to a human solution by mapping unstable identifiers (private keys, signatures) to human identifiers.

At the core, humans want to say "ignore everything that isn't from a friend or family member, unless it's an emergency"

Expressing that with technology is hard, especially when people try to solve for identity with technology. Identity is a social construct, it lives outside of cryptographic proof. The systems we build do very little to try and map cryptographic proof back outside the system to identity.

School clubs, hospitals, governments, family, names, friends, etc. are all social constructs. Some social constructs are stronger than others (hospitals and governments have a lot of steps involved in making the social construct!) but they're all still social constructs.

Identity is fiat. There is no way around it.

Spoon boy says it best:

> Do not try to bend the spoon. That is impossible. > Instead, only try to realize the truth. > There is no spoon. > Then you'll see it is not the spoon that bends, it is only yourself

There is really nothing you can do immediately that will matter if your kid (whatever age) is in an accident and you aren't there. They aren't going to withold lifesaving care, or anything like that. Sure you want to know, but that's a you problem.

If your kid is lost, tell them to call 911. They'll most likely be able to help more quickly than you will.

911 might get them home but it can be a traumatizing experience

This is one of those answers that applies nicely in an orderly, developed world where circumstances and legal structures are the same. In many places in the world (that also widely use email, mobile phones and all sorts of digital communications with all the problems being discussed in this thread), you would most definitely want your loved one to at least have the option of contacting you before they call the authorities. Surprisingly often, their emergency problem might even be caused by those same authorities.

This could easily be solved if everyone called the police when they found a lost child and let them sort it out. Also any doctor could have "break through" access along with the hospital they are at has it as well.

I’m not sure that’s an efficient solution at all. If a kid gets hurt/lost in my neighborhood, I’d much rather be able to call their parents than add an entire extra step of calling the police and having the police call the parents.

Calling 911 could generate a misdemeanor or felony charge (neglect or abuse) for the parents. Use it if you believe the situation warrants it, but at least in the US its better to avoid involving the police just due to social liability.

Given the current state of phone network security, "You can trust I'm a real doctor because your phone rang when I called you" doesn't seem like a good solution.

That is precisely why one or more emergency communication protocols are necessary. They need to be carefully designed to reduce the risk of infiltration by scammers. As with all forms of security, some level of convenience will need to be sacrificed.

I considered your examples to describe two different kinds of scenarios, which might merit different kinds of security measures.

1. Incoming communication from a young child (or a person who is very dependent on you): you'll probably want your phone line to stay fully open. Hopefully in the case of young children, this means that their parents are relatively young and will have grown up with skepticism toward incoming communication from strangers.

2. Incoming communication about a younger, adult relative. Maybe for many people, such communication could bear the introduction of a bit of slowness by security measures. Probably in most cases, there's little that the older relative can do for the younger, temporarily incommunicado relative. They might not need to get a message about them right away. In many cases, the message will be bad news anyway, something that the older parent can do nothing about. Such bad news can probably wait a few hours, even a day or two to be delivered, and it's not too bad for the older relative to be none the wiser for a bit, if such temporary impotence protects them from the increasingly present threat of serious, life-altering scams.

As with all security measures, there's a tradeoff between convenience/immediacy/cost and security. It will likely be hard to design reliable, secure, and accessible emergency communication protocols, but I hope (and optimistically suspect) that it's indeed possible. Attempting to design such protocols is a worthy endeavor for us to undertake, given how many of our loved ones are increasingly vulnerable to randos who have no business getting to their front door so easily.

> Such bad news can probably wait a few hours, even a day or two to be delivered, and it's not too bad for the older relative to be none the wiser for a bit

That right there will be a deal breaker to many.

Your kid gets hit on their bike across town. Maybe you'll find out two days later?!

Or someone has hours left to live, and you're not trying to do anything at all - just be by their side.

Organ donation? High risk operations?

These questions can't wait days.

I'm still hopeful that a good emergency communication protocol or set of protocols could make quick, but well-verified emergency communication possible. In my earlier comment I wanted to communicate that a speed tradeoff would be involved when protecting ourselves from scammers. Maybe I was too dramatic when talking about waiting hours or days to hear from a loved one, but we'd likely need to give up near-instant incoming communication from strangers (and loved ones trying to contact us through strangers) if we seriously want to protect ourselves from scammers.

For many people, the tradeoff--even if in the order of minutes or an hour or two--will be unacceptable and they'll prefer to leave their incoming communication channels completely open and unsecured. However, others people may decide that a small tradeoff is worth it, when weighing their own vulnerability to destructive scams vs. a much lower probability of needing to help a loved one with the catastrophic examples you mentioned. This latter group should not be considered by society to be heartless. Though nobody dies right away when they lose their life savings to a scam, they may very well end up dying or ending up with a very miserable life as a result of that scam. They should not be blamed for reasonably protecting themselves (AND their loved ones, who'd also be affected indirectly by that scam.)

I largely agree with you, but in our metro the question isn’t whether a child has a cell phone, but whether or not it’s a smart phone or a dumb one. Having a smart phone also helps with location tracking.

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